MySpace.com The Biggest?

There’s no offical comScore release out yet, but several sources are reporting (this is the TechCrunch post) that MySpace has become “the biggest site on the Internet” in terms of total page views (vs reach).

Michael Arrington posted a chart (per comScore).

Now here’s Compete’s Snapshot, which strongly disputes the chart above in terms of overall traffic (though not page views):

Here’s Google Trends, which shows Yahoo still ahead in terms of traffic, but with MySpace very close:

And here’s Alexa data, which looks more like the Compete chart above (same when you look at views):

Murdoch et al. are crowing about this and there will be a lot of public discussion about whether the comScore data are accurate. Indeed, maybe this is an opportunity for “the industry” to really carefully scrunitize the methodology being used to generate these numbers and traffic data online more generally. There are people who are are quite skeptical about MySpace’s claims about its number of users, etc.

The “public data” above (Google Trends, Compete and Alexa) to varying degrees show that Yahoo! still is the “biggest site” on the Internet. But of the three sets, Compete is the most reliable. Nielsen and Hitwise will need to weigh in here. In the past, comScore has been criticized (Nielsen as well) regarding its methodology. (Here’s the company’s public response). I think we do have something of a credibility problem regarding the data in the market, which does need to be addressed in a transparent way.